Neil Beloufa creates extraordinary and unexpected worlds. Cinema and video play a central role in his work, which is presented through highly sophisticated staging and installations in which visitors are invited to physically take part in the presentation of the works. By alternating between the stories, he tells and their staging, he further confuses the audience. Each project starts from the observation of a cultural milieu or an ordinary situation, pushing them beyond their limits to see what their excesses and disjunctions produce.

Kempinski was created when the artist, a student at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was sent on a study trip to Mali. “There was an expectation to make a documentary in a Third World country, and I wanted to break the rules and teach people not to exploit exoticism. […] Instead of doing real interviews, I asked people to imagine the future in the present,” he explains. The inhabitants of Mopti, a port city at the confluence of the Niger and Bani rivers, are invited to write the script. They also provide the lighting for the scenes, all of which take place at night, serving as the backdrop for the fantastical stories and ideals of progress they deliver to the camera. Neon lights take on the appearance of lightsabers, and animals and objects become beings capable of thought on a par with humans. Beloufa describes his work as a “science fiction documentary.” The artist draws on the modern culture of Afrofuturism, while inviting us to revisit an older tradition: animism—which attributes to things and all forms of life a soul analogous to the human soul—and the oral transmission of its myths and fables. Through this narrative creation, he invites us to reflect on the future of a society still caught up in the present of the postcolonial gaze.